> worst case is the company goes under, but you still keep using last released version indefinitely, and hope new entity (maybe even hyperscaler!) forks the code
But it's not always the worst case, is it? If the licence is permissive, an hyperscaler can just take is and make a proprietary product out of it.
Hence copyleft licences without a CLA. Nobody could make Linux proprietary because the copyright is shared between so many people/companies.
I don't understand what you are saying. What has a "supplier" to do in this?
Copyleft is always the best for the customer. Copyleft says "the customer has rights". Permissive says "do whatever you want, as long as you keep my name somewhere in the attributions".
A product - in this case, software - is supplied from a supplier, or vendor, to their customer. Is this business 101?
The usual worst case for the supplier is that they give the product but don't get paid, and the usual worst case for the customer is that they give the money but don't get the product.
With copyleft specifically, the supplier is much more likely to not get paid, but the customer receives the benefit of being allowed to continue the maintenance of the software themselves if the supplier goes out of business. The supplier hopes this will help them acquire and keep customers, many of whom will pay, and keep them in business.
I understand what a supplier is. I don't understand how it relates to what I said.
> With copyleft specifically, the supplier is much more likely to not get paid
That doesn't make any sense. Whether the supplier open sources their code as permissive or copyleft doesn't have any impact on the likelihood of getting paid.
But if they distribute it as permissive, a competitor can just make a proprietary fork. Possibly continuously importing the new improvements from upstream and focusing on differentiating. Whereas if they distribute it as copyleft, a competitor has to share their changes, that upstream can benefit from.
So for the supplier, if that's how you want to call it, it's better to licence code as copyleft. Except if the whole idea is to be adopted by corporations, but in that case don't whine when they take your code and build a proprietary product without contributing anything back.
The original company went under, they no longer exist, so they obviously don't care.
The software user does not care either. OK, someone made a proprietary fork, and that "someone" is a hyperscaler... so what? The last released version is still out there and still can be used-as is / maintained by you / maintained by other 3rd party.
The new maintainers / fork authors should not care too. They base off the last released version, and their fork is not affected in any shape by what some hyperscalers do.
(I guess you can make an argument that proprietary fork might pull users/resources from the open-source one... but I don't think it's a big issue. If the users chose open-source version to begin with, why would they switch to proprietary fork?)
But it's not always the worst case, is it? If the licence is permissive, an hyperscaler can just take is and make a proprietary product out of it.
Hence copyleft licences without a CLA. Nobody could make Linux proprietary because the copyright is shared between so many people/companies.